2007-04-26

Anti-Americanism

Well, the BBC, normally giving a fairly mild left-wing slant to things (I think the right-wing's criticism of the BBC is grossly overstated), has come up with a series on anti-Americanism. And actually points out that it is completely unjustified. Part one of this says the following:

"In the Abbey Churchyard in the lovely English city of Bath, groups of demonstrators, many - though not all - of them Quakers, regularly gather to protest against the iniquities of the world.

My dear mother Gloria Webb, who died last year, was one of the protesters. In her day, she was an energetic duffle-coated figure who wanted to ban the bomb, stop wars of all kinds and suffering anywhere.

She was a wonderful person, my mum, and so were her friends. Yet it always struck me, when she told me about these protests (and when, I freely confess, I attended them with enthusiasm as a youngster) that there was an odd one-sidedness to the game.

The protests against nuclear weapons, for instance, concentrated on American weapons. The anti-war rallies were against American-led wars. The anti death penalty campaign focused on Texas.

A pattern was emerging and has never seriously been altered. A pattern of willingness to condemn America for the tiniest indiscretion - or to magnify those indiscretions - while leaving the murderers, dictators, and thieves who run other nations oddly untouched."

What more needs to be said to show up the gross hypocrisy of the left? They don't just condemn tiny indiscretions, or magnify tiny indiscretions, when they can't find even the tiniest thing wrong, because America has actually responded to the bulk of the criticism and is now incredibly squeaky-clean, they have resorted to completely fabricating things. They found that so much less stressful on their pea-brains.

It is something that struck me in Australia too. I could see the demos against US nukes. I didn't see any demos saying "how about the Soviet Union give up its nukes, and its horrible dictatorship, then we can kindly ask the Americans to give up their nukes, now that the threat of communist dictatorship has passed?". Nope. What they were after was the Soviet dictatorship to take over the world. Communism had done nothing but produce gross human rights abuses so far, but surely if we try it in enough countries, ONE of them is bound to turn out for the better - right??? Surely Marx can't have been TOTALLY WRONG about just about everything, could he? Could one man be so stupid? Could all those hippies all be stupid? Surely stupid hippy is a contradiction in terms, right? Yeah, well. Not everyone bought into the hype, Mr Clinton. Some of us actually started investigating this strange phenomenon. It took a couple of decades to complete the investigation, but the results are now in.